What it was that drew me in the first place to the study of religious ideas and of the texts from which they emerged, I am unable to remember. Other interests beckoned early on: newspapering and railroading being the two most persistent.
It turned out that I did learn newspapering by working for two or three and actually editing one of them, and I did learn about railroading by doing some of it. In the end, though, religion and its textual bases placed the strongest claim upon my intellect.
People who think they know me are wont to ask -- often with raised eyebrow -- what it was that led me to the priesthood. The not-so-veiled subtext of the question usually was, "How was it that YOU, of all people, wanted to be a priest?" The confusion inherent in the question referred to my open heterodoxy and agnosticism.
During my undergraduate years majoring in English and philosophy, I came into contact with clergymen who clearly valued intellectual integrity. One was a Methodist minister named James W. Wright. Another was Dudley H. Burr, an Episcopal priest. Each was a mensch. Each had been tested by front-line duty as chaplains in World War II. Each was well read and steeped in the work of the Greek philosophers and in that of the 18th- and 19th-century European thinkers.
Their sermons were masterpieces of clear thinking, eschewing piety and over-obvious admonition. You wouldn't have called them agnostics then. Yet, as I reflect upon their sermons at a remove of more than 50 years, I remember them posing questions that invited consideration rather than hammering home conclusions. Neither, for instance, ever insisted that the reality of God was manifestly evident, rather a mystery at best.
That fascinated me. It freed me seriously to think that whatever "God" was could not be apprehended directly through normal means. My studies in English literature eventually brought me to the poetry of William Wordsworth, in particular these lines from his poem "Tintern Abbey":
. . . And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things . . .
Something, Wordsworth was saying, had got his attention. He appears to have known that whatever the source, it was both without and within himself. He didn't go out to preach about it or vend his idea as an a priori proposition that in his opinion was indisputable.
Whenever I encounter religious pronouncements founded on the shifting sands of certitude passed off as incontrovertible truth, I think of Wordsworth and of my clergy heroes. The journey of my professional life as a priest and teacher, enabled by my mentors, has been taken by way of the texts upon which Judaism and Christianity are based.
I learned from the early Greek philosophers that none of the texts that graced their culture were considered to be sacred and thus exempt from critique and analysis. The texts said what they said and were open to interpretation. A group within Plato's academy known as the "Skeptics" routinely called for the suspension of judgment where beliefs absent data were concerned.
As time went on, though, that disposition was recast as such texts were appropriated to serve as foundations of various belief systems the sects of which were at first called "heretics," meaning those communities that had chosen to treat certain texts as sacred. Later those who abandoned the sects became known as "heretics," the implication being that they had chosen in error.
By Socrates' time, belief in the gods had become almost mandatory in society, and doubt either of their potency or existence brought trouble. The gates were closing against independent thought. By the time the church had cast its lot with the Roman empire in the fourth century CE, the deed was done. The texts of the Bible were deemed sacred and exempt from any interpretation other than that allowed by ecclesiastical authorities. Those who held out for intellectual freedom were the heretics.
It took some years during my formation for me to discern that it was the texts that counted. It was not the abstraction of theologies wrested piecemeal from the texts to concoct systems of belief. I figured that the priesthood could use in its ranks somebody like me. So, apparently, did the bishop who ordained me, knowing of my allergy to theology and love of the ancient texts.
When recently it became necessary to adjust the use of rooms in our home, I was required to box up or get rid of several dozens of books. I was dismayed at first. Then a careful cataloging of my collection helped me realize that many of them were theological tomes, making the clear-out easier.
Taking one with another, it was clear that a great many of the books' authors had struggled to systematize belief into neatly constructed formulae using scraps here and there from biblical texts.
The texts are disorderly, though, and do not lend themselves to such systemization. If a God there must be, you won't find Him/Her/It in the clause of any creed. However, one may be fortunate enough to experience something akin to what moved Wordsworth or in the reading of such biblical passages as the 19th psalm:
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handy-work. One day telleth another; and one night certifieth another. There is neither speech nor language; but their voices are heard among them. Their sound is gone out into the lands; and their words into the ends of the world.
Or these words from a priest friend of mine named Peter Lawson. In speaking of the universe, Peter said he used the term to designate "the core, source, force of the mysterious and unknowable."
